Sandy Rideout, a storage engineer at L.L.Bean Inc. in Freeport, ME, had become increasingly unhappy with the outdoor gear retailer's storage backup and restore environment. The system was built around IBM Corp.'s Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) and ran on the mainframe under z/OS, but was backing up more than 240 open-systems nodes--Windows, AIX, Linux, Sun and NetWare.

Rideout had long suspected mainframe constraints were slowing down the backup, and things came to a head in the summer of 2005. "We had instances of excruciating, long restores," she recalls. "In some cases, not all the data was recovered." Open-systems backups were a particular concern.